The march to nowhere

La Shawn Barber on Chris Rock and his “triumph of ignorance and vulgarity” at the Oscars. I didn’t watch. The last time I watched, Bob Hope was presiding, I think. Heck, with rare exceptions, I don’t even watch new Hollywood movies these days.
To me the Oscars represent another example of the left’s march through our institutions. The left has captured nearly all of the organizations and phenomena that meant something to me when I was growing up — the New York Times, CBS News, the NAACP, the ACLU, the professoriate, Hollywood, etc. etc. But it’s a meaningless triumph because these institutions have lost their authority precisely by virtue of their leftward tilt. To illustrate, a Zogby poll shows that 39 percent of Democrats, but only 13 percent of Republicans, watch the Oscars. (Hat tip: PoliPundit).
HINDROCKET adds: Those numbers are stunning; wouldn’t you think that if the film industry were motivated by economic self-interest, it would try to find a way to avoid alienating the members of America’s most popular political party? Plus, I can hardly be the only viewer who turned off the telecast almost as soon as it began because of the host’s anti-Bush rant. On what theory does it make sense to put on a show that will drive away large numbers of viewers–and gratuitously, too, since Rock’s Bush-bashing had nothing whatever to do with the subject at hand? It’s more evidence that, as Michael Medved has often argued, for Hollywood it’s not about profit, it’s about ideology.
UPDATE by HINDROCKET: Deacon and I are probably pretty hard-core–the last comedian I really liked was Jack Benny–but USA Today, hardly a hotbed of conservatism, shared my reaction: